04 Browse Collection Images

04 Browse Collection Images is the reading side of ZMongo's image storage: it pulls saved images back out of a collection and hands them to ComfyUI as tensors you can actually preview, pass to a sampler, or feed to an image-to-image pipeline. Save with 04 Easy Save Image, browse with this. They're the pair that makes the database a real asset library instead of a black box.

The source's docstring is refreshingly concrete about the workflow: use it with ComfyUI's built-in Preview Image node - image_batch shows a grid from the collection/page, selected_image shows the one you picked via selected_index.

How it works

The node lists documents from a collection, decodes each one's image field locally when it can, and falls back to a backend image route when the data is server-side only. No new backend endpoint needed - it reuses the API session.

Required inputs that matter:

• session - from the API Key Session node.
• collection_name - defaults to images.
• field_path - the field holding the image bytes, default image_data.
• query_json - Mongo-style filter (default {} = everything).
• limit / skip - paging; limit caps at 64.
• selected_index - which image in the batch becomes selected_image.
• thumbnail_width / thumbnail_height - the batch canvas size, default 512×512. Every frame gets letterboxed onto this canvas so the batch is a uniform shape (important - ComfyUI batches need matching dimensions).

Outputs are the richest in the pack:

• image_batch - all images in the page as one IMAGE tensor.
• selected_image - the single image at selected_index.
• json - the raw list-docs payload.
• document_ids - list of ids on the page.
• indexed_document_ids - the same ids as a numbered string list ("0: abc", "1: def"), for feeding into selector nodes.
• selected_document_id - the id of your selected image. This is the gold output: wire it into a Get Doc or a Gemini-from-doc node and you've got a full "browse → pick → process" loop.
• count - how many documents matched.
• status - human-readable state, useful for debugging.

Gotchas

• Batch images are letterboxed onto the thumbnail canvas with black bars, so a contact sheet looks tidy but the actual pixels are padded. Preview with selected_image (which is decoded natively) when you care about exact pixels.
• master_key_hex is an optional decryption key for images stored encrypted server-side - leave blank unless your backend uses it.
• The cache option exists because listing/decoding can be slow on big collections; a cached browse is fast but can serve stale rows.

Install

ComfyUI Manager → ComfyUI-ZMongo, or clone:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/CentralFloridaAttorney/ComfyUI-ZMongo

restart, then let the first import churn through the pack's heavy requirements.txt. The image nodes need pillow/numpy/torch - the rest (langchain, pymilvus, …) is installed but unused here.